''Give Dean credit for visiting red state''

"Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean, in a visit to Boise Friday, served as the leader of a pep rally aimed at boosting prospects for the party's local and legislative candidates. Given Idaho's preponderance of Republican voters, that's about the best he could hope for. Democrats, by tacit admission, are unlikely to win any ballot races in 2006 above the Statehouse level even though Republicans have obvious liabilities.

Give Dean a lot of credit for showing up. His message was serious, and any time you can draw 500 Democrats to a rally in Idaho, you've accomplished something.

Dean, the former governor of Vermont who had the early lead in the Democratic presidential primary campaign of 2004, stuck to some familiar rhetoric in Boise. He lambasted the Bush administration for its failure to offer national health insurance. He took aim at those targets de jour, Tom DeLay and Karl Rove, and accused Republicans of treating veterans shabbily.

Significantly, Dean refrained from overt criticism of Bush's handling of the war in Iraq; it is unproductive to suggest our troops are not winning when it is imperative they must.

Neither did he offer any alternative to Bush's unpopular Social Security rescue plan, though national observers have criticized the party for failing to do so. Some of Dean's topics are the grist of blue-state Democratic campaigning: that abortion and gay marriage, for instance, "are none of the government's business - those decisions belong to individual families."
Dean says traditional political roles have been reversed, that Republicans are the party of big government, and Democrats are espousing traditional family values. When it comes to federal spending, no one can quarrel with that.

So, what is Dean's role in the immediate future?

He has thrown out some inflammatory comments about the GOP, columnist David Broder observes, which fire up the Democratic faithful, but make some other party leaders cringe. They would like him to focus on grass-roots organizing and leave the policy-making to the Democratic leaders in Congress. As to the party's prospects in Idaho, Dean should carry the message back to Washington that while the Democratic presidential candidate three years from now probably cannot carry this Republican state, the choice of a national nominee could have important repercussions at the local level. If Hillary Clinton emerges as the presidential candidate, her coattails would be woefully short in Idaho, much as Jimmy Carter's were in 1980. Idaho candidates would rather have someone in the mold of Sen. John Edwards, the vice presidential candidate who ran with Sen. John Kerry last year. The Republican record of enormous budget deficits and moral lapses coupled with public concern about the Iraq war, pensions and Social Security, and the cost of health care offer opportunities for Democrats. Dean, it seems, may have stopped shooting from the hip and is focusing on those possibilities."-from the editorial in today's Pocatello Idaho State Journal.